Röntgen

This year's bicycle tour with some of my former classmates took me to the banks of the Main and Tauber rivers. One of the highlights of our trip was the city of Würzburg, mainly known for its Residence Castle (UN heritage) and its two old hospitals, Julius- and Bürgerspital, where nowadays Franconian wine is served in special Bocksbeutel bottles.

Würzburg is also the city where, in 1895, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovered the roentgen rays, better known in the US as X-rays. Röntgen modestly used to call them X-Strahlen in German or, in French, the scientific language of the 19th century, rayons X. 

Röntgen's manuscript

The laboratory room where Röntgen made his discovery can, in principle, be visited, but when I went there with two friends, I found the door locked. Luckily enough, an excellent booklet about the history of the new kind of radiation (Über eine neue Art von Strahlen) was on sale at the secretariat of the now-material research institute for a ridiculous price of € 2.50.

Here I used the occasion to convince the two ladies present that I should be privileged to show my two buddies Röntgen's lab since I had written way back in 1960 my diploma thesis about: Applying the contrast transfer function to X-ray picturing. Oh, miracle, one of the girls left and returned with the key. 

The room we visited was filled with Ruhmkorff induction coils, Crookes tubes, and Hittorf vacuum glass vessels. The picture below may give you an impression.

The room where Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen made his discovery

Röntgen was lucky that the vacuum he could achieve in his time was relatively poor, so when he applied high tension between two electrodes melted into a glass vessel, the remaining positively charged gas ions hitting the metal cathode generated free electrons. These electrons, in turn, are accelerated by the high tension towards the anode, producing x-ray bremsstrahlung. This term, like eigenvalue, is one of the few remaining German words or half-words in today's scientific language.

By the way, applying the contrast transfer function to the picture Röntgen took of a hand would have considerably improved the photo's quality. Please compare the left hand to the left hand on the right.

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